I grew up around medicine, but what really captured my imagination about cardiology was the challenges and successes. My grandfather had a huge heart attack at an early age. So since then, I'd always been interested in what cardiologists could do to keep people alive and restore their quality of life.
Atrial fibrillation is an electrical storm in the upper chambers of the heart. When a patient has an arrhythmia, it is frequently just a few abnormal cells, fractions of a millimeter, that are behaving in an abnormal way. And to successfully treat the arrhythmia, we need to find those abnormal cells.
So catheter ablation has been an enormous advance. We can completely cure people being plagued by a difficulty arrhythmia. And after a single procedure, they could not need medical care from there on.
Here at UVA, we have all the tools, knowledge, and expertise to give patients the best-possible chance of being free of atrial fibrillation.